The ELRA License Wizard

The ELRA License Wizard Valérie Mapelli, Vladimir Popescu, Lin Liu, Meritxell Fernández-Barrera, Khalid Choukri ELDA/ELRA 9 rue des Cordelières, 75013 Paris, France Email: {mapelli; popescu; lin; meritxell; choukri}@elda.org Abstract To allow an easy understanding of the various licenses that exist for the use of Language Resources (ELRA’s, META-SHARE’s, Creative Commons’, etc.), ELRA has developed a License Wizard to help the right-holders share/distribute their resources under the appropriate license. It also aims to be exploited by users to better understand the legal obligations that apply in various licensing situations. The present paper elaborates on the License Wizard functionalities of this web configurator, which enables to select a number of legal features and obtain the user license adapted to the users selection, to define which user licenses they would like to select in order to distribute their Language Resources, to integrate the user license terms into a Distribution Agreement that could be proposed to ELRA or META- SHARE for further distribution through the ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources. Thanks to a flexible back office, the structure of the legal feature selection can easily be reviewed to include other features that may be relevant for other licenses. Integrating contributions from other initiatives thus aim to be one of the obvious next steps, with a special focus on CLARIN and Linked Data experiences. Keywords: web configurator, licensing, Language Resource distribution agreement 1. Objectives From the very beginning of the association, ELRA1 has come across all types of legal issues that arise when exchanging and sharing Language Resources (LRs). The association has devoted huge efforts to streamline the licensing processes while continuously monitoring the impacts of regulation changes on the HLT community activities and trying to liaise with all the institutions involved for common actions. The first major step was to come up with licenses for both the research and the industrial sectors to use the resources available in the ELRA Catalogue of Language Resources2. ELRA contracts were drawn up between ELRA and the resource provider and/or ELRA and the resource user (known as a Distribution agreement for the former, and a VAR-Value Added Reseller or End-User agreement for the latter). Recently, its strong involvement in the META-SHARE infrastructure3 focused on designing and drafting a small set of licenses, inspired by ELRA licenses but also accounting for the new trends of permissive licenses and free resources, represented in particular by the ones created by the Creative Commons. To allow an easy understanding of the various licenses that exist for the use of Language Resources (ELRA’s, META- SHARE’s, Creative Commons’, etc.), ELRA has developed a License Wizard4 to help the right-holders share/distribute their resources under the appropriate license. It also aims to be exploited by users to better understand the legal obligations that apply in various licensing situations. 2. Methodology This work was initiated in the META-SHARE initiative5 within the Meta-Net Network of Excellence6. In Deliverable 6.1.3 META-SHARE: Licenses, Legal, IPR and Licensing Issues7 (Choukri et al., 2012), a number of 1 http://www.elra.info 2 http://catalogue.elra.info 3 …

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